For me 3rd, 4th and 5th. Especially the 5th. I don't know how many times I tried, but I wanted to kill myself everytime I went through it, and it made the 7th one look like the 1st Special Stage in Sonic 1.

I've taken a look at his EXEs. All he is doing is replacing which sprite file the game is searching for by, for example, changing "Players/Sonic.bin" to "Players/ChibiSonic.bin" in the EXE. He actually had to blank the following entry "Players/SuperSonic.bin", to fit the new string in, so chances are the game will crash if the player transforms.

Add "devMenu=1" to the "[Game]" section of Settings.ini, then press ESC in game.

EDIT: Oh my god what did i do:

Spoiler

yea aight this is p. huge. Excellent find, don't know how you did that outside thinking it'll work... a bit surprised it did :V

I figured since the EXE probably isn't encrypted and it's looking for strings in the ini file, that "devMenu" would be in the EXE somewhere (is that how you found it, looking for "dev?"). Figured there'd probably more stuff hidden in "game" that'd be discoverable that way.

Didn't find much, buuut...

Spoiler

Seems there's likelihood for a "mod loader" to work after all, at last a fan one :^)

yea aight this is p. huge. Excellent find, don't know how you did that outside thinking it'll work... a bit surprised it did :V

I figured since the EXE probably isn't encrypted and it's looking for strings in the ini file, that "devMenu" would be in the EXE somewhere (is that how you found it, looking for "dev?"). Figured there'd probably more stuff hidden in "game" that'd be discoverable that way.

Didn't find much, buuut...

Spoiler

Seems there's likelihood for a "mod loader" to work after all, at last a fan one :^)

I used IDA and Hex-Rays on the EXE, and it actually produced readable code (I thought Denuvo was meant to protect that, but whatever). There's another option for data file in the Settings.ini, yeah, but a better way to make a modloader in my opinion would be to make the game load them unpacked from a folder. I've managed to get Sonic CD to do that before, so if Denuvo doesn't get in the way it should be fairly easy.

I THOUGHT the game would be able to read from folder! Do you know if "dataFile" is a toggle or a datapath? If it's a datapath then it might not prove to be that useful for us, and since you've already done this with Sonic CD, we should be in the clear either way. However, if it's a toggle, it might be an in-engine method of loading from folders instead of from the datafile. From what it sounds, though, you seem to be saying it's closer to the former.EDIT: confirmed it's a string. Loads by setting:

dataFile="[name].rsdk"

in the Game section. Like you said, if we can load via folders, this option's pretty much useless to us, so let's hope we can do that. Else, if somehow things go wrong, we have this.

Honestly, I feel like Tax's implementation of Denuvo was lax at best, simply utilizing it because SEGA said they want it for DRM / antipiracy. I'm pretty sure they exclusively used the always online feature (which honestly is probably still crackable via the "storm.api" exploit...), so you might be in the clear. Best of luck!